Stan K-B: One
thing has always puzzled me: the quintessential Aesop fable has anthropomorphic
animals in ALL the roles [...] The later date for the fable suggests La
Fontaine (1621 – 1694) the great French fabulist who regularly included humans
in his tales
[...]To recap the yarn: on the
boy’s first “Cry wolf” the farmers have no reason to doubt him until the truth
emerges, viz., false alarm.[...] It’s the boy-liar who suffers on the rare
occasion when he’s not lying...
JM:Great point about the
differences bt. Aesop/La
Fontaine. Wasn't Victor joking about how, for
example, a single political statement on TV may now sway the
world's economical balance?
Joseph Aisenberg [ on Can anyone ellucidate me about
the meaning of VN's expression, then, his "fugal
theme"? A fugue ( as in "fugitive")
carries us back into "escape"!] I know what you mean
about how a fugue doesn't seem like how Glory works [...] One problem I've
always had with this book is that the result of it, Glory, seems at odds with
what Nabokov claims his intention was, to create a story about a romantic
young man who sets off on a great glorious exploit[...] Nabokov has
somehow tried to meld his idea of the nonutilitarian glories of
artistic discovery with that of an actual real life adventure, though what comes
out seems to be ironic: no one in the book thinks Martin is as romantic as he
feels[...] The book seems more like a vortex sucking everything into
oblivion than it does a fugue[...] we are being pushed to believe[ that Martin]
finally disappeared himself[...] surely N. doesn't mean to suggest
that Martin has somehow tripped into a tranparent phantomic realm?
JM: Like you, I think that Glory seems at odds
with what VN claimed his intention was. His memories and reveries seem
to have overwhelmed what he'd planned to express. I conjectured
about musical "recursive themes" but, more emphatically,
of a painting's "fugal point". And yet, I find strong
recurrent links bt "Glory" and VN's early ecstatic short-stories,
"Gods" in particular [ We walk against the wind along
imposing fences. On the same kind of sunny, tremulous day as this we'll head
back north, to Russia... When, beyond the curve, my heart is jabbed by the firs,
the red sand, the corner of the house, I shall totter and fall
prone.]
I'd forgotten that, right in the first page, we get a description
of a dachshund when we read about Martin's
grand-father, white Edelweiss: "the complexity of
heliography accounted for the weightiness and solidity of Grandfather's manly
poses [...] on a striped veranda seat, with a black dachshund that had refused
to sit still, and had come out with three tails in the
photograph[...]" We also learn that Martin's own father
was a doctor, like Chekhov, and he died ("bloated and
short-of breath...in unclear circumstances") in the same
year that the entire photo-album and envelopping country
house went up in flames, in 1918.